Enter your password securely

I came across a nifty little utility that just might keep you from having your passwords stolen from you by a keylogger or similar devices and programs. Neo Aplin wrote this tiny little app called Neo's SafeKeys which will let you enter your passwords via a little onscreen keyboard. The really nifty part is that not only are you defeating keyboard loggers, but it places the buttons differently and the program window is a different size each time it's run, thereby defeating any program that attempts to log which button was clicked by mouse placement. All-in-all if you use public computers or even are just paranoid about your own and run Windows, this app's for you! If you missed the above link, here it is again.

Gabe Perez

I came across this picture on the net today and I want to know more about it. check it our for starters:



So, where did this come from? Who is this Gabe Perez guy and what possessed him to do this? I think it's hilarious and want to know more. I apologize about the crappy image quality but for some reason Blogger does that to it when I upload it, to see a better version click here. Anyways, I searched and couldn't find anything, could any of my fellow stumblers help?

Best rubberband gun EVER

You've gotta check out this video, this gun was created by Anthony Smith over 4 months by hand, and is capable of shooting 40 rubberbands per second, with a capacity of 288. Awesome.. just awesome. Found at techeblog.

False LOLs

I came across a website today, NoMoreLOL.com, which advocates replacing the way too damn often misused LOL acronym with LOI (Laughing on the Inside,) which, honestly, is probably more accurate like 98% of the time. I know there's probably been like 2 times ever I've actually laughed out loud while reading something or chatting at work, but dozens of times I typed LOL (even though I don't use it often) and you know, Sai is right. Screw that, LOL doesn't describe what is going on at all most of the time. Anyways, the site made me LOI, so check it out.

Oh, and sorry about the lack of updates if anybody cares, I haven't really been much into it lately, I've got some serious financial issues I'm trying to deal with, and in the middle of all that my rent money got stolen at knifepoint, so.. I dunno, if anyone cares, click some freakin' ads or send me a buck or something :P

PassiveAggressiveNotes

I just joined the community over at PassiveAggressiveNotes, and I probably should have made up a quick post earlier, but welcome to any members checking out my spot here, check back for more cool stuff at random intervals!

Any bluetooth headset can be eavesdropped even while not on!

I just found some disturbing information about bluetooth headsets for all you cellphone happy consumers. Any bluetooth headset can be listened in on, EVEN WHEN YOU'RE NOT ON IT! Watch the video for more.

Happy New Year!

OK, so I know I'm a day late, but whatever, its not like I had more than 17 hits yesterday, and half of them were probably me. Here's a toon courtesy of LeftHandedToons to ring in the new year.

My Mini City: Naknek

I started my own little city on MyMiniCity.com, and I want all of you to come visit! This site lets you create your own little city, kinda similar to SimCity, except instead of getting bigger by your actions, your city grows by people visiting it. So why don't you pop by and check out Naknek, and if you want, you can create your own too!

Desktop Environments vs. Window Managers

Many of you who are new to Linux have probably encountered the terms desktop environment and window manager, and might be thinking "what the hell are either and why do I care?" Well, if you're not running a brand new computer, you might have a lot of reason to care. I came across an article today on Download Squad that explains the difference in a newbie-friendly manner. Most Linux installations default to either KDE or GNOME. These are both what's known as desktop environments. This is something akin to what Windows is to a PC or what OSX is to a Mac, a full-featured environment that provides everything you need to access everything on your computer. This might seem like 'well, ok duh,' but there are other options. Back in the early days of Linux, you had to put together all the components of a complete system yourself. This involved a window manager.

A window manager does one main thing, and that is to handle windows. That includes the borders and controls that let you control what is visible and how you interact with it. It also includes the menus and desktop icons (if that is how the particular manager does it.) In addition to it, you also needed to have software running to handle your sound, any panels you wanted, screensaver, and anything else you wanted to run. This seems like it might be tedious and complicated, and sometimes it is, but it allows for a COMPLETELY customized Linux experience. You can control every aspect of your system and have it look, act, and work just how you want. And as a side effect of only running the components you need, window managers are much slimmer, quicker, more efficient, and if they crash, they don't take down anything else with them (like that novel you are working on and haven't saved for 25 pages.) A couple of my favorite window managers are Enlightenment and Window Maker. If you have an older PC that seems real sluggish currently, (or you think you can't even use) give one of these a try, you might find out your 233MHz PII can run as well as your 2GHz P4, and can look good doing it.

Tip: if you really are putting it on a 233 (or something slow) go with Window Maker, it is much slimmer than Enlightenment.

Special thanks to Kristin Shoemaker for her (sorry Kristin!) excellent blog post on the topic, check his article for more information on desktop environments and window managers.

USB Flash Drive Virus Proof of Concept

I came across something very disturbing a few minutes ago, and I think the world really needs to know about it. I know you all know that Windows is horribly vulnerable to every PC malady that has ever existed, but here's one that is basically built-in on purpose by Microsoft.

This particular exploit utilizes the built in autorun.inf 'feature' in all recent versions of Windows to run its payload, whose source code can be seen at QuantumG's site where I Stumbled Upon it. What the code does, is basically as soon as you insert the flash drive containing this program, opener.exe, and the 4 lines in autorun.inf, it will find any other removable drives, copy itself onto them, and hide itself. The actual process goes like this:

1. Open an explorer window for the drive we're running from.
2. Make sure there is only one copy of opener.exe running.
3. Scan the available drives for any that are removable.
4. Check that there is some free space on the drive.
5. Check that the drive doesn't already have an autorun.inf.
6. Dump the following into autorun.inf:

   [autorun]
   shell\eject=Eject
   shell\eject\command=opener.exe
   shell=eject
   

   This creates a new shell command which I've just randomly named "Eject" and, importantly, makes it the default action.
7. Write a copy of opener.exe to the drive.
8. Mark both autorun.inf and opener.exe as hidden.
9. Do any other removable drives we can find.
10. Wait about a minute.
11. Go back to step 3.

This is very basic virus behavior, but if the author was malicious, absolutely anything they wanted to do could be done. This has very serious implications for users, and needs to be addressed post-haste by Microsoft. Let's get the word out, you can help by Stumbling, Digging, or doing whatever you can to share this post and get it fixed.

Original site at http://rtfm.insomnia.org/~qg/opener.php
Image courtesy of Francois Thé

How to post HTML code on your website

OK, so I came across this great tip that lets you see the passwords you have saved in Firefox, so I immediately went to post it on here, and after typing it up, putting the code in, and trying to post it, I found out that it won't show the code on my site because it is interpreting it. So, I had a new problem: how to show the code without it being read as code. It took me a few minutes to find out how to do this, and I had to use a few methods of searching before I found the appropriate answer, so here it is just for you:

Within the HTML example, first replace the "&" character with "&" everywhere it occurs. Then replace the "<" character with "<" and the ">" character with ">" in the same way.

Within the HTML example, first replace the "&" character with "&amp;" everywhere it occurs. Then replace the "<" character with "&lt;" and the ">" character with "&gt;" in the same way.

Interestingly enough, in order to post these instructions, I had to replace "&amp;" with "&quot;&amp;&quot;", "&lt;" with "&quot;$amp;lt;&quot;", and "&gt;" with "&quot;$amp;gt;&quot;" so that they themselves aren't interpreted. To show you what I had to type to get "&quot;&amp;&quot;" to display, view the source, cause it would be really really confusing if I tried to make it viewable, the first level of de-interpretation was bad enough, let alone the second. I better stop before I recurse into infinity showing what has to be input as code to display what the code should be. Enjoy!

View password 'asteriskd out' in Firefox

Have you ever needed to see what that password you had Firefox remember last year was because now you can only get on that website from your computer at home, and need it at work? Or something like that. I know it's been awhile since I made a post, but come on guys, nobody has even noticed, have you? Anyways, to see what's behind the ***s, make sure you are on the page you want to get the password from, and it is entered in the box (you can see ****** in the box.) Now, click in the address bar up top, and replace the text in there with the following text: (copy and paste)

javascript:(function(){var s,F,j,f,i; s = ""; F = document.forms; for(j=0; j<F.length; ++j) { f = F[j]; for (i=0; i<f.length; ++i) { if (f[i].type.toLowerCase() == "password") s += f[i].value + "\n"; } } if (s) alert("Passwords in forms on this page:\n\n" + s); else alert("There are no passwords in forms on this page.");})();

When you press enter, you will get a box revealing the mystery!

Pumpkin Pi!

This ranks right up there with the Pi pie (which I'll post in a couple days) for awesomeness in the geekery category.